iOS-Like Dark Menu Bar for Mac OS X Lion

If you’ve been using Nocturne to get the black menubar in Mac OS X but don’t care for any of the features outside of the darker menu bar, check out MenuBarFilter. All it does is turn the Mac menu bar color into a dark black gradient, closely resembling iOS.

MenuBarFilter is extremely lightweight, just uncompress the app and double-click on the Panda icon to turn your menubar black. There are no configuration choices or menu items, so if you want to quit the app you’ll have to find it in Activity Monitor and kill the process, or type this into the Terminal:

killall Finder

Why would you want to stop running this gorgeous little add-on? Bugs of course. MenuBarFilter certainly works in Lion but it doesn’t play that well with Mission Control or full-screen apps, and you’ll see some display artifacts and mismatched colors here and there. I’ve been using it since last night and as long as you don’t expect a perfect fit quite yet, MenuBarFilter is a very nice looking customization to Mac OS X.

Speaking of bugs, if you’re crafty and want to try and troubleshoot the display oddities yourself, you can grab the source code through git with:

hey i have an issue where it will work for my other desktops spaces but not the first one. I have the program on my applications folder and set to open at startup and it works all over except for my main desktop. Any idea why?

There’s also something called Obsidian Menu, it overwrites the default image files but doesn’t work too well with third party menu apps though.

My main beef with these apps is that it just inverts the menu and and turns the highlight into a psychedelic mess, plus it doesn’t change the pull-downs. Having a choice from Apple would be ideal, but they seem pretty stuck on this whole aluminum thing.

I used this and it turned the menu bar into a dark blue. When I killed the process, it turned a light blue. I’ve been tweaking with a lot of themes and such, so maybe that’s the issue. However, I uninstalled Nocturne and the problem is persisting. Please advise, thanks

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